A view from one step back. Trump’s in it for the lulz. We’re in it for the duration.

> The culture has been inching further and further into Trump’s gilded funhouse for years now, and you surely do not need me to tell you that it fucking sucks in there. But we are, by now, all the way in. Trump is nearly as ubiquitous in the culture as he has always believed he should be; the one deeply held belief that has been evident throughout his whole faithless disgrace of a life is people should be talking about Donald Trump more, on television, and he has just about seen that part through. All Trump wants, all he has ever wanted, is to be able to keep doing and taking and saying whatever he wants whenever he wants. He ran for president for this reason and this reason only

> Throughout the past two years, I’ve been struck by the Trump administration’s take on the Bill of Rights—that it means one thing for friends of the president, and something else altogether for his enemies. But what is emerging is not just a breakdown in the ideas of freedom and rights in America: It’s a further pernicious claim that exercising your rights could be met with violence from those in power.

> The American president, once again, mocked. And the American public, once again, let him.

Who’s in the sadder state? Trump being petty and cruel, or us for letting him be.

> A woman, punished for being too sexual. A woman, mocked for her appearance. A woman, Horsefaced. What my colleague Adam Serwer observed about Trumpism was true, in its way, for a country that looked upon that woman, Miss Lewinsky, and found not tragedy, but comedy: The cruelty, then as now, was the point.

Jay Rosen on Fear and Loathing. A solid attempt to re-define the discussion and the terms of discussion. This is what's needed - a more insightful and theory-driven press. Whether we can get there is still (11 Oct 2018) open.

"Not being able to support this kind of language is indicative of an administration that has to defend a President who has said that Mexicans are rapists, white nationalists are 'fine people,' and that Muslims shouldn't be allowed to travel to America," Berschinksi said.

> We live in a lie now, perpetrated from the very top, enhanced by relentless propaganda, and designed to shore up what is a cult. It is growing in strength. It is precisely now that we must manage at every moment to dispel it. And then to vote, en masse, for its extinction.

> Initial capitals make words and ideas seem Really Important. They are to meaning-making what flag pins are to patriotism and gold-plating is to value — cheap signals of depth and quality that are somehow taken seriously by enormous numbers of people. (How seriously? There’s not one but two PolitiFact articles dedicated to discussions of Obama’s pin philosophy.) This capitalization technique is common in get-rich-quick and quack medicine books desperate to sell readers on the Truth of their claims.

Slouching towards Bethlehem. The act of fascism gives way to grounds of fascism.

> There are not many Trump scandals. There is one Trump scandal. Singular: the corruption of the American government by the president and his associates, who are using their official power for personal and financial gain rather than for the welfare of the American people, and their attempts to shield that corruption from political consequences, public scrutiny, or legal accountability.

Trump found a loophole. Now he needs to find a few corrupt friends will to drive through it for him. But the story is in the interpretation of the tweet: - how the doj interprets “look into.”

> This is a nakedly corrupt attempt on the part of the president to discredit and derail an investigation of himself at the expense of a human intelligence source to whose protection the FBI and DOJ are committed. My colleague at Lawfare, Quinta Jurecic, and I fleshed out the history of this saga and warned, “Don’t underestimate this episode. It will have a long tail and big consequences—all of them terrible.”

> The idea that the president doesn’t interfere in law-enforcement investigative matters is one of our deep normative expectations of the modern presidency. But it is not a matter of law. ... The only real restraint on the president—other than his own conscience and political pressures—in dipping down into the FBI and Justice Department and directing investigations for his own personal purposes is the willingness of senior law-enforcement officials to carry out improper orders.

> "This is what splits a country apart," he added. "In many other countries, it's been the beginnings of an authoritarian rule. And that's the larger threat hanging over us now...I find that the threat is growing."

> Politics is downstream from persuasion, and law is downstream from language. Trump has failed to perform the role of a diligent executive, reserving much of his day for television, personal calls, and cultural encyclicals on Twitter.

> For him that is not “populism” (or the U.S. version, “economic anxiety,”) nor garden-variety corruption nor even longer-term democratic distress. Instead it is the reawakening of the force that began destroying Europe a century ago, outright fascism:

The term populism, being the preferred description for a modern-day revolt of the masses, will not provide any meaningful understanding concerning that phenomenon … The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting our societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy.

> Nine Elms was a shrewd choice. It was one of the only places in London where the US could dictate the evolution of a masterplan that would put its shimmering cube at the centre of a fortified arc of paranoia, its building set back behind a militarised terrain of berms, mounds and moats, and surrounded by a necklace of some of the most expensive new apartments in the city, whose developers have been eager to cash in on being part of a new high-security “diplomatic quarter”.

It's in the language. A discourse community identifies its constituents by their language.

>He shares their worldview as easily as he shares their language and videos. He gives their voice and values the biggest platform in politics. He is a neo-fascist sympathizer in the mainstream of American politics, sitting at the heart of the West Wing and world power.

> With Tuesday’s address, however, Trump punched yawning holes in his own would-be doctrine, singling out enemies, expressing horror at their treatment of their people and threatening interference to the point of annihilation.

Who knew leadership could be so HARD! Cultural tourism can be so tedious. Especially at a distance. Look to the sequence of statements.

> Since the rain began falling, however, Trump has struggled to respond to the first natural disaster of his presidency with anything other than contrived seriousness at best, morbid fascination at worst.

> “Record setting rainfall,” Trump observed, before quickly getting in a plug for a friend’s book. “Many people are now saying that this is the worst storm/hurricane they have ever seen. Good news is that we have great talent on the ground,” he noted. “Wow - Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood! We have an all out effort going, and going well!”

Once more into the rhetorical situation - how Trump deals with the social demand for speech.

> On Tuesday he “relinquished what presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan have regarded as a cardinal duty of their job: set a moral course to unify the nation,” wrote The Times’s Mark Landler, in what was correctly labeled a news analysis and not an opinion column. Landler’s assessment, echoed by countless others, was as unassailable as it was haunting, and it was prompted in part by Trump’s perverse response to a question that it’s hard to imagine another president being asked: Did he place the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., on the same “moral plane” as those who showed up to push back at them?

> A soft coup against a cuckoo: It confirmed how impotent Trump had become.

> “Trump is using the precious capital of the bully pulpit to talk about confederate monuments in between savage attacks on fellow Republicans,” Holmes, the former aide to McConnell, told Politico Playbook. “Just think about that. Not tax reform. Not repeal and replace. Not North Korean nuclear capabilities. No focused critiques on extremely vulnerable Democrats who have opposed him at every possible turn.”

Raging against the light. > he had reduced a moral crossroads for the country to a question of naming rights. Standing in front of reporters, Trump came across as an angry man sheltered by a building bearing his own name in big, gold letters. But for how long? Tenants in some buildings have already asked to have the “Trump” taken off. Where would it stop? Would there, perhaps, never even be a statue of Donald J. Trump?

More consideration of the rhetorical situation of Trump's Many Sides statement.

> There is a reason we generally want our presidents to speak out against racism against African Americans amid outbreaks of racial strife and violence. They are well positioned to remind the nation of our founding creed, and of our most conspicuous betrayal of it — of the historically unique experience of African Americans as targets of centuries of violent subjugation, as well as sustained domestic terrorism and deeply ingrained racism, which continues today.

This account makes it clear that Trump mis-used the rhetorical moment. Didn't just miss the opportunity to condemn white supremacists but used it to normalize racism. This is not a rhetorically innocent move.

> The president said he condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” on Saturday. He then repeated the phrase “on many sides” for emphasis. A White House spokesperson later amplified the president’s remarks, telling the Guardian: “The president was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counter-protesters today.”

> But there was strong reaction to Trump’s refusal to denounce far-right extremists who had marched through the streets carrying flaming torches, screaming racial epithets and setting upon their opponents.

Trump tries to take naming out of debate. The conservatives make it the center of debate - by declaring the name is not open for debate.

> But this abomination that happened in Charlottesville over the weekend is not up for debate. It’s not a cultural take or a political platform. Racism, bigotry and terrorism in the name of white nationalism isn’t a “side.” It’s a poison.

The mainstream is raising the specter of Nazism. I never thought I would tag a post with nazism.

> this is the natural result of defining authenticity as spontaneity. Trump and his people did not believe the moment worthy of rhetorical craft, worthy of serious thought. The president is confident that his lazy musings are equal to history. They are not. They are babble in the face of tragedy. They are an embarrassment and disservice to the country.

But

> Ultimately this was not merely the failure of rhetoric or context, but of moral judgment. The president could not bring himself initially to directly acknowledge the victims or distinguish between the instigators and the dead. He could not focus on the provocations of the side marching under a Nazi flag.

> If great words can heal and inspire, base words can corrupt. Trump has been delivering the poison of prejudice in small but increasing doses. In Charlottesville, the effect became fully evident. And the president had no intention of decisively repudiating his work.

> In truth, it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. In a pure market system, access to medical care will be unaffordable for a huge share of the public. Giving them access to quality care means mobilizing government power to redistribute resources, either through direct tax and transfers or through regulations that raise costs for the healthy and lower them for the sick. Obamacare uses both methods, and both are utterly repugnant and unacceptable to movement conservatives. That commitment to abstract anti-government dogma, without any concern for the practical impact, is the quality that makes the Republican Party unlike right-of-center governing parties in any other democracy. In no other country would a conservative party develop a plan for health care that every major industry stakeholder calls completely unworkable.

> The power to destroy remains within the Republican Party’s capacity. The power to translate its ideological principles into practical government is utterly beyond its reach.

> Trumpism is a form of collective gaslighting at Twitter speed. It is founded on the principle that velocity trumps veracity.

> All of this is serious. But it’s not as serious as the seeping, constant attempt — one sacred value at a time — to disorient Americans to the point they accept the unacceptable, cede to the grotesque, acquiesce to total arbitrariness as a governing principle. On one side the Constitution; on the other the rabbit hole that leads to the Trump International Hotel.

Trump's "cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage" makes the global community a global hallucination. Asserts the only position is his. Closes debate. Explains his spectacle. Illustrates how politics differs from business. Assigns us each our role.

We won't mention names. That would be indelicate. Rentiers require a low profile. "growing share of those we hail as “successful” and “innovative” are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it’s a non-issue.... The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees."

> Without language, there is no accountability, no standard of truth. If Trump never says anything concrete, he never has to do anything concrete. If Trump never makes a statement of commitment, Trump supporters never have to confront what they really voted for. If his promises are vague to the point of opacity, Trump cannot be criticised for breaking them.

Accurate speech is, free inquiry is, but free speech is an extracurricular value. The responsibility falls to the administrators:

>My advice to administrators: Stop thinking of yourselves as in-house philosophers or free-speech champions or dispensers of moral wisdom, and accept your responsibility as managers of crowd-control, an art with its own history and analytical tools, and one that you had better learn and learn quickly.

My parents let me watch the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on The News at 6:00 and 10:00 pm. I watched the Watergate investigation live on network tv all summer. I watched the news reports with death tolls from Viet Nam every evening. I even saw Oswald shot live on a b&w tv. This is scarier because it is Trump going nihilist.

> It’s difficult to describe the feeling of seeing the president of the United States lie, in the moment, about ongoing events and testimony.
> ...

>This, in the end, is what’s so disturbing about his Monday afternoon tweet. It’s another sign of Trump’s basic contempt for the idea of an independent, observable reality that stands as a baseline for his actions. That reality is how you hold politicians accountable; it’s why the press is vital to a free and healthy democracy. But Trump sees no advantage in accountability, no reason to honor the truth or even gesture toward its existence. Both he and his White House have made a conscious decision to destabilize public discourse, to fracture and undermine common understanding. President Trump isn’t just lying to the American people; he’s saying, almost openly, that the truth just doesn’t matter either way.

> But whataboutism extends beyond rhetoric, said Dmitry Dubrovsky, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "It's not only a narrative practice; it's real policy," he said. "For example, the Russians installed a special institute to cover the violation of human rights in the United States."

> Yet these were superficialities. On closer inspection, Tuesday’s speech was not that normal at all—at least, not in light of what the President and his aides have spent the past few weeks doing and saying. Trump’s sudden distaste for “the wedge of disunity”—a wedge he has used with such abandon that he could just as well brand it, gild it, and have his sons sell it—was so obviously at odds with his public persona that it provoked, on the Democratic side of the aisle, bitter laughter. But the starkest contradiction the speech contained was the one between the President, who promised “a new program of national rebuilding,” and the words of his senior adviser, Stephen Bannon, who announced, only five days earlier, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Washington, that the Administration had begun a project of “deconstruction.” So which is it: Is the federal government in the construction business, as Trump insists, or the deconstruction business, as Bannon has put it? Can it possibly be in both?

> an old-fashioned autocrat wielding a very familiar rhetorical strategy.

> all follow a general pattern. They attack and threaten the press with deliberate and ominous intensity; the press, in turn, adopts a more oppositional tone and role. “And then that paves the way for the autocrat’s next move,” Simon told me. “Popular support for the media dwindles and the leader starts instituting restrictions. It’s an old strategy.” Simon pointed to Trump’s lack of originality, recalling that both Néstor Kirchner, of Argentina, and Tabaré Ramón Vázquez, of Uruguay, referred to the press as the “unelected political opposition.” And, as Simon has written, it was the late Hugo Chávez who first mastered Twitter as a way of bypassing the media and providing his supporters with alternative facts.

I can't recall the rhetorical figure of "repeat until exhausted." Too tired. But this is also about kairos: "Not by accident did he put on that 77-minute performance for the media — hurling insults, flinging lies, marinating in self-pity, luxuriating in self-love — just three days after the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and amid intensifying questions about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians.
"He was cluttering the landscape. Overwhelming the senses. Betting that a surfeit of clangorous music would obscure any particularly galling note. That wager got him all the way to the White House, though he has no place being there, and so he sticks with it. The news conference was a case study in such orchestrated chaos."

A consideration of Trump's alternative facts and their rhetorical use. They make any poster of facts an involuntary dissident.

> What Americans have learned is that our system of checks and balances is so weak that even parks employees can become enemies of the state. They are learning their rights as they lose them, grieving for what they once took for granted. Fear is matched by incredulity that hundreds of years of imperfect democracy could cede into autocracy with such ease. Trump’s win was followed by debate over what it means to live in a “post-facts” world. This was a fatuous debate: if facts did not matter, then Trump and his team, whose threats of punishment and litigation long preceded his official lock on power, would not work so hard to suppress them. The idea of a fact always mattered – it simply had to be the Trump administration’s facts that counted. Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, made this blatant last weekend when she stated that the administration would proffer “alternative facts” that justified its political aims.

> America has become a country of involuntary dissidents, where those who seek to stay employed respond to illusions with allusions. (“If you’re part of a group that’s paid to applaud, you’re a ‘claqueur’,” Merriam-Webster dictionary slyly tweeted after Trump’s CIA visit, which allegedly included an entourage who clapped on command.) The media are “the opposition” and should “keep its mouth shut”, according to Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. But in a digital age, where it is increasingly hard to classify who counts as “the media”, anyone who seeks to inform the public is potentially under attack.

Once more into the breech of consumption. Don't make me think! "Academic writing has the benefit of scholarly rigor, full documentation, and original thinking. But the transmission of our ideas is routinely hampered — understandably, given academe’s publication, evaluation, and tenure conditions — by a great deal of peer-oriented jargon."

Not all that innovative, as commencement speeches tend to be formulaic anyway, and hardly inclusive with only 85 self-selected contributors. it does widen the available means of persuasion, a little. but it perhaps it's a choir preaching to a choir. I used to create a similar effect by grabbing lines of commonplaces from student themes to create an ur-theme that impressed a lot but said little.

"Ultimately, it seems the case that, although the text does have mismatch issues between audience invoked and audience imagined, it has still proven to be a successful text, none the less. In terms of its status as "popular linguistics" text, it actually appears to conform pretty strongly to the genre conventions of that genre, at least, if earlier works such as Pinker's The Language Instinct and Tannen's You Just Don't Understand are used as a gauge for success. "

Looks at FedWiki as a "mockup" prototype of Ward's next vision. Where as WikiWiki is a means for many to work on one piece of content (convergence) stored in one server, what if the similar mechanisms were in a place where we each manage our own small wiki, but through a network means, we can share and have it federated with collaborators.

It's a sure thing. It's based on Science. Consider what perfect means here: SEO ranking and shareable. Still, this is one of the rare how-tos that build in sharing and skimming to the reading. It helps us see the genre, and get a sense of how commodification drives it.

Audrey Watters on TED talks. Shiny, compelling, but no room for critique. "But once something becomes a TED Talk, it becomes oddly unassailable. The video, the speech, the idea, the applause — there too often stops our critical faculties. We don’t interrupt. We don’t jeer. We don’t ask any follow-up questions. They lecture. We listen."